Publications on Climate Change

The environment suffers from a rapidly changing climate. Global warming, due to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, endangers humanity and all life on earth.

The term climate change, which is often used interchangeably with the terms "greenhouse effect" and "global warming", describes a regional and/ or global change in temperature and weather patterns through the natural and unnatural buildup of gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxides, in the atmosphere.

The more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere the lesser our planet can breathe. The sun's energy, on earth turned into heat, is virtually trapped causing the planet to heat up and therefore change weather patterns on a global scale. The worst and well-known effects include the melting of the earth's polar regions resulting in a dramatic sea level rise that causes heavier rainfall patterns and habitat loss. Other effects are potential droughts, stress and heart problems due to the heat.

There are external (climate forcings) and internal (hysteresis) factors, for example variations in solar radiation, deviations in the Earth's orbit and the level of greenhouse gas concentrations, that can shape our planet's climate.

The biggest danger to earth's health is the sapient. Most of the amount of the unwanted atmospheric gases are man-made. This is why current science indicates a direct link between climate change over the last century and humans hunger activities in generating and producing energy. The wost form of energy generation is the burning of fossil fuels, which are minerals like coal and oil but also natural gases like methane and diesel.

Since the time of industrialization humanity blew billions and billions of ton's of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. For a long time it seemed nothing happens as the earth's climate system is too large to see short-term effects. Fact is, the climate system moves extremely slowly which causes time-lags between the reaction to inputs. This is valid not only into one direction, the ruination of earth's atmosphere, but also when it comes to reparation. That is why we have to re-invent our energy-generating processes and switch to renewable energy sources like sun- and wind energy. Only science and technology can help us to prevent the worst scenario, an non-reversible defective atmosphere.

Tags: Climate Change, Greenhouse Effect, Atmospheric Gases, Energy Consumption, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, Global Warming

Written by: Warren Christopher On: 2009-02-15